Learn about our use of DataOctopus
As legislation becomes more onerous, and clients begin to realise the value of clear and consistent data, monitoring quality has become a significant part of the design and delivery process. Information Management, for the educated delivery team at least, is no longer an afterthought; it is treated as an essential discipline alongside and supporting the design of projects. Throughout the design and construction stages, an important part of this is reporting on, and demonstrating continuous improvement.
At Evolve Consultancy, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have always formed the foundations of identifying how well-developed the models are, and reporting this to clients in a clear, easy to understand manner. The drawback of producing reports is that it can be time consuming. The time spent providing detailed PowerBI dashboards far outweighs the review time they are often given. Ongoing KPI reporting needs to be simple and effective and quick.
This is one of the reasons why we at Evolve Consultancy have been investigating the potential offered by the IDS format and have been working with DataOctopus to develop a reporting mechanism with almost zero time expenditure. It’s become a critical part of our process, especially in helping support the Golden Thread of information on Higher-Risk Buildings. We now use DataOctopus on all residential projects.
The DataOctopus Project checks home page
What is IDS?
The Information Delivery Standard is being developed by BuildingSmart to define the information requirements within model-based exchanges, in particular, using IFCs. In simple terms, it is an XML file that contains details of what data should be included with specific elements.
IDS has its limitations at this point, but it can support the basic KPIs we require. For example: does every element have a Type and Component ID defined? Is every element classified using the Uniclass Pr table? IDS can go further, checking the syntax of those entries conforms with the Project information Standard. IDS is fairly clunky to build, but once done, opens the door to fast, consistent checking.
How does DataOctopus work?
DataOctopus is an online platform into which you upload your IDS and IFC files, and then hit “Run”. It couldn’t be easier.
Uploading and selecting files for checking
When creating a new check, you’re able to add comments, or longer descriptions if you need, and assign a discipline from the UK National Annex to ISO 19650-2 standard list. This helps with filtering the results later. Each check costs one credit, which at the most costs only £3.
Once the DataOctopus server has processed the checks, you’re notified by email and the IDS results graph is immediately updated. All checks are time-stamped, and can be filtered with custom tags depending on how you need to organise the data. We use tags to filter by design stage, allowing us either a comparison of each discipline’s performance, or an individual team’s progress.
Filtered view of structural checks in stage 4 only
It’s not designed to replace more detailed checks. We use Solibri Office for detailed reviews alongside DataOctopus, but each serves a specific purpose. For us, DataOctopus is a reporting tool to measure basic KPIs and produce simple graphical representations of model development over a period of time. You don’t use DataOctopus to visualise the models, you don’t use DataOctopus to lead a coordination meeting; it has no learning curve whatsoever. We use Solibri for those tasks, to drill down into much more detailed geometric and data-driven quality assurance using logic and relationships that far outstrips the capabilities of IDS. We gain the benefits from any and all solutions as needed. But the best thing about it? It’s a cheap, pay-as-you-go model. There’s no large capital outlay, no training costs, not even a tie-in subscription. You pay for the checks you need, when you need them, which helps with cashflow, especially considering the unpredictability of project programmes.
Improving quality
Clicking on any of the IDS checks brings up a summary of compliance, showing the elements that have been checked and those that have failed. It also clarified (using standard IDS-style terminology) what the check was looking for and what it found.
Summary of failed checks
This can be helpful, but not as helpful if your aim is to make sure the designers can fix what is wrong. Reporting alone doesn’t improve quality. You can fire all the charts and RAG matrices you want at a client, but without feeding the changes required back to the designers they are nothing more than a tick-box exercise. Changing the Failure summary to Type View gives a list view of all the Types in the checked model, and a total sum of how many failed. Using this, which can be downloaded as a CSV and distributed to the model author, means it’s an easy exercise to prioritise corrections to those types that are more prevalent, or more important at that point in time.
Total number of types that have failed the check
The Golden Thread
At regular stages you create a Snapshot which can be previewed and printed to PDF or shared as a link. Not only does the Snapshot visualise the results over time as a simple line graph, you’re given a comparison between the previous checks – great if you need to report progress as a percentage.
Stage 4 project Snapshot of architectural and structural results
At the end of stage, or at the BSA Gateways, the models and corresponding Snapshots form part of the Golden Thread information retained on the client’s CDE.
The next step for us is to investigate whether changes between Gateway 2 and Gateway 3 can be recorded using IDS and DataOctopus. But for now, as several of our HRB projects move through Gateway 2 into the early stages of construction, we’ll be carrying on with our regular reporting: what used to take us around half a day for each project can now be completed within minutes for all projects. Seriously, minutes.
Adding DataOctopus to our Information Management / BIM toolkit has given us an easily affordable and simple way to keep on top of our clients’ data reporting needs.